This session is devoted to a symposium honoring the world-renowned contributions of the late, widely beloved philosopher of science Wesley C. Salmon. When our colleagues Paul Humphreys and Sandra Mitchell organized this session, Paul explained that he would like me to chair it, because my professional and personal bonds with Wes were forged a half-century ago and have solidified ever since. Indeed, I was encouraged to construe my mandate as calling for a sketch of Wes's intellectual odyssey and enduring achievements. This overview is to introduce our symposium today.
I gratefully accepted the assignment, not only because of my immense respect for Wes, but also because the affection I bear for him is deep and abiding. For me, he has always been a philosophic comrade-in-arms, and a soul-mate. His sterling character and eminence were depicted most movingly in a published Letter-to-the-Editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, written by John Norton (2 May 2001) as chair of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Norton concluded: “Wes once dedicated a volume, `To the giants on whose shoulders we stand.' For both his humanity and scholarship, he is the giant on whose shoulders we stand.”
In Wes's obituary of 4 May 2001 in the New York Times (p. 24), I was correctly quoted as crediting him with having developed a “distinctive and innovative theory of scientific explanation based on causality.” Prior to Wes's work, the linchpin of Carl Hempel's pioneering models of explanation had been that explanations are arguments featuring the expectability of phenomena. But Wes's conception fundamentally abjured arguments for the expectability of the explanandum-events, and he construed the task of explanation as the articulation of factors causally relevant to the occurrence of events. The inveterate notion that explanations are arguments was inspired by what J. Alberto Coffa colorfully dubbed “deductive chauvinism.” Wes rejected it, root and branch, in order to allow that nature may simply not exhibit sufficient regularity to assure the theoretical expectability of the explananda.
For example, untreated syphilis is a risk factor for the affliction of paresis, and indeed only untreated syphilitics become paretics; yet most untreated syphilitics do not become paretics. As Wes saw it, untreated syphilis, by thus being causally relevant to paresis, affords some scientific understanding of it, even if there are no hidden further factors that would render its occurrence expectable with a probability of at least one-half. Thus, Wes wants us to be grateful for small explanatory mercies.
I believe that this much of his work on explanation would alone have constituted a major contribution. But, as we know, his scope was far wider: He also ranged over space-time philosophy, probability and induction, causality, the critique of theism, and a defense of a scientific realist ontology.
In response to Wes's obituary in the New York Times, Peter Achinstein wrote me shortly afterward (e-mail, 10 May 2001). And Peter reported that, just a few weeks earlier, he had had a telephone conversation with Wes, because Peter was then writing a paper expanding the basic idea underlying Wes's “empirical defense of realism.” As Peter informed me furthermore, Wes—sharp as ever in that conversation—was very helpful to him in thinking about that ongoing topic. Since then, Peter has published his paper and has dedicated it to Wes's memory (Achinstein Reference Achinstein2002).
It is not well-known that Wes also developed some ideas on the empirical testability of psychoanalytic theory. In 1959, fifteen years before I began to examine the Freudian corpus systematically, Wes contributed a paper on “Psychoanalytic Theory and Evidence” to Sidney Hook's conference volume, Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy (Reference Salmon and Hook1959). An important feature of this paper is Wes's lucid account of the sort of empirical evidence that would disconfirm Freud's motivational explanation of so-called “counterwish-dreams.”
Such dreams feature “the frustration of a wish or the occurrence of something clearly unwished-for” (Freud Reference Freud1953–1975, 4: 157). For example, a one-time fellow student of Freud's, who had envied his primacy at school, became a trial attorney and then dreamt that, very disappointingly, he had lost all of his court cases (Reference Freud1953–1975, 4: 152). Yet Freud claimed universally that all dreams are, nonetheless, wish-fulfilling. And he argued that the attorney's adverse dream—precisely by being thus wish-contravening—had cunningly fulfilled the attorney's unconscious wish to disprove Freud's thesis of universal wish fulfillment! Mind you, Freud had not claimed that every wish is fulfilled in each dream, but only that every dream is caused by some wish W or other, and that the manifest dream content depicts the fulfillment of W. As Freud put it: “the nonfulfillment of one wish meant the fulfillment of another” (Reference Freud1953–1975, 4: 157).
Is Freud treating us to a case of immunity to disconfirmation, as in “Heads I win, tails you lose?” Wes rightly pointed out that Freud does not deserve censure on this score. For instance, Wes notes that “if one of these [counterwish] dreams which cannot be explained as any other kind of wish fulfillment were to occur to someone who had never heard of Freud's theory, this would be most damaging” to that theory (Reference Salmon and Hook1959, 264). Indeed, I have argued in detail (Reference Grünbaum1993) that Freud's purported explanation of counterwish dreams is multiply untenable! Thus, Wes concludes quite appropriately that whether psychoanalytic theory “is empirically confirmed is an entirely different question” (Reference Salmon and Hook1959, 265).
Hans Reichenbach, who supervised Wes's Ph.D. thesis at UCLA, had been a co-founder of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society. As Wes told us in a note in a 1999 Festschrift dedicated to both his beloved Merrilee and himself, Reichenbach had encouraged him to work on psychoanalysis, but Wes “found the literature in that field insurmountable” (Reference Salmon, Galavotti and Pagnini1999, 237 n. 6). Evidently, Reichenbach's exhortation to Wes to deal with psychoanalysis was not fruitless after all.
One of Wes's projects which, alas, was left incomplete at the time of his death was a book on Italian science that he was co-authoring with Dennis Looney, chairman and professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. Wes loved Italy and things Italian. And he mastered that language to the point of delivering professional lectures in it at several universities there. As my colleague Looney informed me, one of the many excellent pieces that Wes contributed to their developing volume was a moving reminiscence of his stint as an assistant at Enrico Fermi's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago about 1945, and a ringing declaration on man's inhumanity to man during the twentieth century. As Wes told us in that piece:
The devastation produced by the two [atomic] bombs [dropped on Japan] demonstrated to the world the horror of nuclear war. When we read the accounts of the victims of the bombing, we are sickened and depressed. The U.S. faced dreadful moral decisions; we don't pretend to have the final word on whether these decisions were correct or incorrect. We can say, however, that the inhumanity wrought by the Nazis in the holocaust, [by] the Americans in their use of atomic weapons against civilian populations, and [by] the Japanese in their brutal conduct of the war in the Pacific should have taught human beings lessons that they seem nevertheless not yet to have learned. (Salmon and Looney, Reference Salmon and Looneyunpublished mss.)
In this connection, I should convey Wes's view of the use and abuse of technology. He was, of course, mindful of the evil purposes to which technology has been and can be put, no less than of the humane ones. But, as he saw it, the evil uses of technology do not warrant its vilification per se, let alone do such abuses legitimate the ideological disparagement of science for making technology possible.
In May 2001, I covered the highlights of Wes's illustrious academic career in my obituary, which appeared in the Newsletter of the Philosophy of Science Association (vol. 7, no. 2) and also elsewhere. Hence I shall not recapitulate these biographical facts here. Yet I hope I shall be forgiven for now adding a personal note: I exulted boundlessly over Wes's and Merrilee's decision to join the faculty of my university in 1981, after I had endeavored doggedly for years to bring them to Pittsburgh. But Wes's philosophical comradeship with me had flourished for well over twenty-five years before then. And in a monograph-length essay on “The Philosophy of Hans Reichenbach” in Synthèse, Wes covered the Reichenbachian inspiration of much of his and my work on shared topics up to the year 1977 (Reference Salmon1977, especially 33–44).
He has bequeathed a rich philosophical legacy to us, and a shining example of the joys of warm friendship. Along with his many other friends, I shall always miss him sorely.
